Sterek Library (a03 Edition)

No Looking Back Or Down

By; thewolfwiththeredroses

They're alive.

They're not okay, not by any stretch of the imagination, but they are alive.

That's more than Derek ever thought they would have.

They're...happy, for the most part. Junior year has just ended for the pack, and they wanted to throw a party to celebrate. So much has happened to them in the past year, so many people have died, they decided that they wanted to enjoy themselves whilst they still could.

Derek even let them use the loft. He thought that it could be good for them. He had thought that if they were all in one place, all together and celebrating, not talking or thinking about all that they had lost, maybe then they would see, they would understand.

Evidently, they did not.

Derek looks around himself and all he can see is happy faces, smiling, laughing, carefree. He wants to be happy for them, wants to be proud, but he can't. He can't, because they haven't been paying attention.

And Derek is just so angry.

There is a face missing from the crowd of teenagers, but Derek can hear him. His heartbeat is rabbit-quick, panicked, and headed towards the parking lot outside. Derek knows where the boy is going, knows what he's going to do, because he's done the same countless times before.

Slipping unnoticed in to the shadows, Derek follows.

***

When Derek arrives at the boy's house, the light blue Jeep is already standing in the driveway, motor still running. The doors to both the car and the house are thrown wide open, although Derek can see no signs of movement.

Listening more closely, he hears the familiar heartbeat, still rabbit-quick and panicked, worryingly so. He hears little else. No wardrobe doors banging, no drawers sliding open-shut-open-shut, no sounds of a rush.

Instead, he hears measured footsteps, the soft impact of a bag being slung over someone's shoulder, the creaking of old floorboards.

The boy had planned this.

Derek knew it.

He waits in the shadows, listening as footsteps come clambering down the staircase ever closer, as the front door slams to a close, as the boy comes in to view, opening the passenger side door and throwing his pre-packed duffel bag on to the seat.

That is when Derek chooses to make his appearance. Silent as ever, he steps out of the shadow of the warn wooden porch and into the eye line of the boy as he is rounding the car to reach the driver's side.

A multitude of emotions play out on Stiles' face as he lays eyes on Derek. He stops still in front of the open driver's side door, mouth slightly agape, staring. He doesn't look angry, like Derek thought he would. He doesn't even look sad, which would have been Derek's second guess.

He looks like a lot of things, things that Stiles always looks like, these days. He looks tired, and thin, gaunt, like the shadow of a person, like he hasn't eaten or slept in days, which, Derek knows, he hasn't. He looks small, fragile, beaten.

Weak.

He looks like a hundred things that Stiles should never, ever look like. Not Stiles, who is always so full of life, of movement and energy. Stiles, who stares in the face of the biggest bad around and tells it where to go. Stiles, who has always been so breathtakingly beautiful that Derek could hardly bare looking, for the fear that he would dirty the boy with the ash that rains over everything he cares about.